141–150 of 165 posts
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Inqtel also funds Anaconda, Mongodb and Gitlab, interesting
They fund much more than this, and almost all of it is cool. Check out In-Q-Tel Labs, they have some cool projects. disclaimer: I work with In-Q-Tel investments almost daily, but am not affiliated.
Do you see any interesting trends? In terms of one layer deeper than the general trends such as AI, space, etc.
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What might somebody (or some company) use this for? 192 bytes * 750 packets = 144000 bytes per month at what speed/latency?
Hourly data collection for science like stream gages, earthquakes, air quality, precipitation, or similar in very remote areas. Sensors along a pipeline etc to monitor remote infrastructure. Texting in remote areas for logging, cattle, forestry services, etc. Redundancy for boats, emergency services etc that may have primary and secondary communication channels, but still greatly benefit from the capacity for redunda…
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What might somebody (or some company) use this for? 192 bytes * 750 packets = 144000 bytes per month at what speed/latency?
This seems like a surprisingly small amount of data in this day and age of connectedness. I wonder how much total bandwidth each of these satellites can push per month. Anyone know the backend aggregate sustained data rate per sat?
(I live on a side of a hill and had the entire dev kit standing on my roof that was tall enough to have a view over a large part of the city and out into the bay)
At the time, I heard from support that they were launching new satellites that would improve the connectivity in built up locations (such as a city) but I eventually gave up.
At the time, there were 2 satellites a day that were prospects to connect to based on my location, but we met an invisible issue that couldn't be debugged. Potentially it was a satellite visibility issue but could have also been that the available satellite connection was backlogged with other devices / the satellite didn't have a large enough window of connectivity to perform the upload / there was noise interfering with the connection / other mysterious reason that would need expensive test equipment to root cause.
I took it with me into the plains one day (Livermore) and it connected once in the 8.5 hours I was there so it was functional and the RF signal strength was good for the received packet.
My takeaway was that the tech is well suited for rural areas all over the globe where there is no other connectivity options and there exists applications that can work well with the high latency / low bandwidth payloads. Well monitoring jumps to mind as does CO2 gas monitoring in mines - slow moving signals, rural locations, expensive to send a truck to go and monitor.
I have one of their dev kits (the neat one with a built in solar panel and Wi-Fi connection) - sadly I was unable to get it to send/receive more than 1 message in San Francisco over a 3 month period. (I live on a side of a hill and had the entire dev kit standing on my roof that was tall enough to have a view over a large part of the city and out into the bay) At the time, I heard from support that they were launchin…
I suspect there is some underlying issue with these high-latency / low-bandwidth solutions that just makes them impractical in real life.
- IMHO, price could be prohibitive for many use cases (e.g. water meters)
- Signal strength could be an issue for urban environments (e.g. inside buildings)
- There aren't many small business use cases for IoT connectivity that does beyond WiFi (both wrt range and power budget). What I have seen is that there are usually several big players (e.g. utilities, municipality, factories) that at some point deploy LoRa based or similar connectivity. LoRa can actually cover a huge area with just a handful of self operated gateways (similar to Helium in this respect).
If these truly are just 11x11x2.8cm - then in a few years we will have bunch of super fast and very destructive mini bullets orbiting earth and destroying very expensive space equipment.
Can we please consider the amount of trash we send out in space before it is too late?
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Critical applications that are only sending one data point per hour. It's limited to 750 packets per month.
What do you mean 1 data point? It transmits bytes, not data points. I could easily stuff 60 temperature and humidity readings into one hourly 192b packet(ie per-minute weather data). That's 120 data points, not 1. And you could easily double that with simple differential encoding or beyond other compression techniques